Rubio says Obama’s global warming policies will ‘destroy economy’

Sen. Marco Rubio, speaking yesterday in Iowa, said the policies being implemented by President Obama to fight global warming will “destroy” the economy, and do nothing for the environment. Addressing a town hall meeting in Cedar Rapids, Rubio was responding to an attendee’s statement that “global warming is a hoax.” Rubio replied, saying: “It’s not in this following sense: The climate has always changed. There’s never been a time when the climate has not been changing.”

A United States senator from Florida, Rubio said he has seen many laws and policies that wouldn’t do anything to prevent the rise of sea levels or affect the Earth’s temperature, but they all had one thing in common: they would cost “hundreds of thousands of jobs and make America less competitive.” Indeed, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy admitted to Congress last year that all the new rules and regulations it is rolling out would only avert warming by .01 degrees.

He also discussed the recent Paris Climate Talks held in early December, in which 195 nations agreed to try and reduce carbon dioxide emissions but nothing was legally binding. It has been decried by environmental activists like James Hansen, who said it was “a fraud really, a fake,” with “no action, just promises.” Hansen also said that “It’s just bull*hit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target’ and then try to do a little better every five years.”

Rubio went on to say that prior to the climate conference, the Paris terror attacks occurred, where 130 people were killed and hundreds more wounded. He said if he was president, he still would have held the conference but would have turned it into a “world summit on defeating ISIS.” Rubio told the crowd that ISIS, and not climate change, was the most immediate threat facing the world. “They’re burning people alive in cages right now. They’re beheading people [as we speak]. We would have dealt with it that way.”

Rubio also said it was “outrageous” there was a provision in the Paris climate agreement that allows the U.S. and other developed countries to send billions to developing countries to cope with “extreme weather.” Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado/Boulder, said that “there were fewer extreme weather events” despite claims that 2015 was the warmest year ever. It also had the “lowest catastrophe losses in a generation.”